SAN ANTONIO – We need this Final Four to reach back across the years and remind us of everything it used to be. We need these two games today, Oklahoma State-Georgia Tech and Duke-Connecticut, to be as evenly matched and as fiercely contested as everyone seems to think they will.

We need one of those old-school Monday night classics, the ones that keep you on the edge of your seat right to the final notes of “One Shining Moment.”

College basketball needs these games to put some time and distance between itself and all the murkiness of the past 18 months. Syracuse’s feel-good title win last year was the lone memorable moment of an otherwise mundane Final Four in New Orleans. San Antonio must produce something else, something better. If college basketball matters to you, then you want it to matter to the rest of the country again, too. These four teams can make that happen.

They can make you forget the thinning talent pool at the game’s top, which has rendered the sport irrelevant in so many eyes. UConn’s Charlie Villanueva dabbled with the idea of going pro straight out of high school; he opted to go to college. His teammate, Emeka Okafor, did also. But there’s no telling how good Georgia Tech would have been this year if Chris Bosh weren’t playing in Toronto now.

There always are reminders of players who aren’t here, super-teams that never quite got formed. Nobody much cares as long as the games are good. We need that.

They can make you forget the blood-curdling scandals that have pock-marked the sport’s landscape the last 14 months, from St. Bonaventure’s presidential farce of a foul-up to St. John’s sex romp through Pittsburgh, from Harrick & Son’s hyperkinetic abuses at both Rhode Island and Georgia to the bone-chilling saga at Baylor. It hasn’t been easy being a fan of college basketball lately. Nobody much cares as long as the games are good. We need that.

For the players, it remains what it’s always been: the holiest of holy grails. That occurred to Villanueva the moment he mounted the ladder last Saturday afternoon in Phoenix. How many kids across America dream of making that climb, clipping away a swatch of twine, soaking in that basketball view? Villanueva had been one of them, first as a Queens kid playing at Newtown, then out in Jersey at Blair Academy.

“That’s the crazy part,” Villanueva said yesterday. “I actually thought of giving that up. I look around me and I see what I almost missed, and I realize that the best move I ever made was coming to college.”

Villanueva smiled, looked around the room, shook his head.

“I mean, I’m at the Final Four,” he said.

It doesn’t matter how you get here, just that you get here. John Lucas III saw the talent around him at Baylor last year, figured he could be making this trip someday, only in a green-and-white uniform. Then one teammate, Patrick Dennehy, turned up dead, and another, Carlos Dotson, copped to killing him.

“I felt as far away from a Final Four as you can feel last summer,” Lucas, Oklahoma State’s splendid guard, said. “And now, to be here, to take part in all this . . . it’s hard to put into words everything it means. I want to enjoy every minute. Every second.”

If you care about college basketball, if the sport matters beyond where you finish in your office bracket pool, then you understand what Lucas said. You relate to everything Villanueva felt as he ascended those steps in Phoenix. The game needs this weekend to proceed the way it looks like it will.

More than ever, we need to feel the warmth Villanueva felt on those steps in Phoenix. We need to feel the same joy filling our chests that filled Lucas’ in East Rutherford.